Hi, let me tell you about my website

Source: https://github.com/blujan/lujantech

It'd been some 15 years or so since I've built a website basically from the ground up, and at the behest of my wife to put more of myself out there, I finally took up the project to make what you can now see at https://lujan.tech, and because I can't help myself, I had to add some of my own stipulations to make this an opportunity to learn along with it being a showcase. Otherwise, I would have spent \$20-50 on one of the many great templates out there, filled it in, and called it a day. As the modern woodworker's adage goes — why buy it for $100 when you can make it yourself for 3x the cost and take three months to complete it?

Credit/Shout-outs

In no particular order, I'd like to start with out shout-outs to some people and sites that seriously helped me out

Of these, I can't recommend Real Time Colors enough.

A Short History

Not unlike many programmers my age and younger, I mostly started on my programming journey hacking and putting together websites. At that time, I didn't even have a HTML reference. So it was just an endless fervor of trial-and-error and reverse engineering other websites to make things work until I was able to save up for that very thick, treasured manual (also yes, it was tables and under construction GIFs as far as the eye can see). So while my Pink Floyd fan website has likely been lost to time, those happiest days of my life helped outline a drive (and when absolutely necessary, a methodology) that has been a part of me since.

Requirements and Considerations

No WYSIWYG Editors

So I was one of those that started building websites on Windows Notepad. To top it off in the text-based realm, I was also one of the few people who actively used (and like!) LaTeX in my undergraduate class, and while my editor of choice long since shifted to Vim-like editors and some graphical editors look truly fantastic, I wanted to stick to building the site in the code itself lest I evoke traumatic memories of the kinds of HTML that Frontpage used to generate.

Use Modern Frameworks

It felt like with a lot of the frameworks coming out, building a website sans editor was either back in vogue or, I'm guessing the more likely, never really went away. Moreover, there's now some quite interesting tools for developing in that environment at scale. Svelte caught my eye fairly early on as less bloated alternative to React, and I decided to checkout TailwindCSS as my CSS framework, mostly due to the amazing VSCode extension and documentation. As a corollary to this requirement, it also meant taking advantage of what the framework had to offer. Sure, I only deployed with two dialog boxes, but why not take advantage of the abstraction that Svelte has to offer to make a more generic component to allow for easy re-use should I want to expand?

Deploy a Pure Container Based Solution

This is, admittedly, a purely arbitrary requirement. That is, I wanted to learn how to build and deploy for this environment even though it's kind of completely overkill for how tiny the website currently is. On top of that, I figured why not go all out and learn how to traverse AWS. So even though I don't foresee the need to have the kinds of horizontal (or vertical, really) scaling that a pure containerized solution might provide, I signed up for Lightsail container services and proceeded to spend 30 minutes figuring out how to login via AWS CLI for the first time.

Dev Tools Used

#tech #webdesign